Definition
Duplex valor maritagii (also rendered in sources as "dulpex valor maritagii," reflecting a scribal variant) is a doctrine of old English feudal law meaning "double the value of the marriage." It describes a financial penalty imposed on an infant ward who refused a suitable marriage match tendered by their guardian. If the ward rejected the offered match and then married someone else without the guardian's consent, the ward forfeited to the guardian twice the assessed value of the originally proposed marriage — that is, double what a jury would have assessed the match to be worth, or double what any person would have paid the guardian for the right to that alliance.
The doctrine operated within the broader system of feudal wardship, under which a guardian held significant rights over an infant ward's person and property, including the profitable right of marriage — the power to arrange and benefit financially from the ward's matrimonial alliance. The ward's obligation was not to accept every match offered, but refusal triggered liability for the value of the match; unauthorized self-marriage triggered the doubled penalty.
Common Confusion
The term should not be confused with the simpler concept of valor maritagii, which refers to the single value of the marriage — the baseline assessment a jury would place on the guardian's right to arrange the ward's match. Duplex valor maritagii is specifically the doubled penalty triggered by the ward's self-marriage without consent, not merely the refusal of a tendered match. Refusal alone forfeited the single value; marriage without consent forfeited double.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in historical legal sources dealing with English feudal tenure, wardship, and the incidents of knight's service. Researchers will find it in medieval and early modern treatises, Year Books, and commentaries predating the abolition of military tenures. A critical navigational point: the Statute of Tenures (1660, 12 Car. II, c. 24) abolished the feudal incidents of wardship and marriage in England, rendering this doctrine a matter of legal history rather than living law after that date. Any source invoking duplex valor maritagii in a post-1660 English context is either historical commentary or in error.
The term appears in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (Book II, Chapter 5) in the discussion of the incidents of tenure by knight's service, where Blackstone explains both the guardian's right of marriage and the penalties for refusal and unauthorized marriage. Researchers working with Blackstone should cross-reference his account against earlier sources such as Littleton's Tenures and Coke upon Littleton, which provide the foundational common law exposition.
The variant spelling "dulpex" appearing in some manuscript and printed sources (including Black's 2nd edition entry header) is a scribal or typographical corruption of "duplex." Researchers searching historical indices or digitized sources should run searches under both spellings to avoid missing relevant references.
The doctrine connects tightly to the broader corpus of feudal wardship materials. Researchers pursuing related questions about the guardian's financial rights, the assessment of valor maritagii by jury, or the ward's remedies will need to work through the feudal tenure literature as a connected whole rather than isolating this penalty in isolation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the foundational entry, correctly identifying the doctrine's mechanism: the guardian's power to tender a suitable match without disparagement, the ward's forfeiture of the single value upon refusal, and the doubled penalty upon self-marriage without consent. Black's account is accurate as far as it goes but truncated — the entry appears to have been cut mid-sentence in the available source text, ending before completing the rule regarding wards who married themselves.
Blackstone (Commentaries, Book II) is the most accessible and complete historical synthesis of this doctrine for English-language researchers, situating duplex valor maritagii within the full framework of wardship incidents and noting that the Statute of Tenures abolished the entire system. Littleton and Coke provide the deeper common law roots for those requiring primary authority rather than commentary.
Historical dictionaries generally agree on the substance of the rule. The principal gap in secondary dictionary treatments is the failure to explain clearly that the two penalties — single value for refusal, double value for self-marriage — are distinct triggers, not the same forfeiture in different amounts.
Jurisdictional Note
This doctrine is purely English in origin and has no meaningful reception in American law. American property law developed without the feudal wardship system, and the incidents of tenure by knight's service were never transplanted to the colonies in operative form. The term appears in American legal literature only in historical or comparative contexts.